Game Industry

A representative from the Marketing Department from my University asked me to write them a little blurb about myself so here it is:

I co-founded a business called Waden Kane Game Studios about a month after I graduated from UAT in 2014. Waden Kane Game Studios develops software solutions for companies in the form of video games ranging from mobile platforms to VR. I received my Bachelor’s of Arts in Game Design, after taking a few summer semesters I graduated earlier than the recommend 4-year program. After college I

A lot has been happening here at Waden Kane Studios. Earlier this month representatives from Waden Kane Studios attended GDC 2017 in San Francisco to show off our latest title; LeadnBrimestone. The CEO of Waden Kane met with some account managers from PlayStation to discuss the future of LnB on their platform. Given the raw nature of the prototype, it was difficult to get any critical feedback, however they did mention that our art style was unique and looked good. The development team assigned for this project is the biggest team assembled yet at Waden Kane Studios for a single project. With over 7 people working on this epic side-scrolling shooter, it’s guaranteed to be an awesome game that will be available Summer of 2018.

The other day I was talking to one of my friends about a new booming business in the US known as “Escape Rooms”. It got me thinking; “Why aren’t we making VR rooms for these types of businesses. Escape rooms are the just beginning of commercial uses for Virtual Reality headsets. Currently one of the biggest issues and concerns for developing for VR HMDs or Head Mount Displays is that you have to be connected to a computer at all times. Which limits the amount of space someone can actually interact with your game. Another issue with that wired connection is the fear, the fear that you or someone might fall or walk too far out of reach causing tension on the link setup which could damage your tech. The technology required to run a VR setup varies, but our set up costs us close to 2k just to get it up and running. If that number is constantly in the back of your head it’s hard to become “fully” immersed with one of these VR HMDs on, knowing that tripping over a cable could cost you hundreds of dollars.

The Phoenix Comicon took place last weekend at the Phoenix Convention Center. Every year I swear the audience and attendance rate increases. Luckily thanks to the GameColab we were able to reserve a spot in the AZVGS or Arizona Video Game Showcase where we had an epic booth for people to come check our latest titles. We tried selling some sweet swag, AKA shirts with Lead N Brimstone on them and no one purchased a shirt. Maybe it was the price of 20$ or maybe it was because no one knew the product or our brand yet. I doubt it was the artwork itself, once we started giving t-shirts out for free people were stoked to get them and said they look awesome. So we didn’t make money, in fact quite the opposite happened. But when you’re in the entertainment industry, you pay for marketing which is really just another investment in your products that could and actually did lead to more app installs and publicity.

WKGS released our first title “Turtle Boarden” on April 28th, 2016. It was a monumental pivoting point in our lives, as most of our development team only has one if any other titles published for mobile devices. Unfortunately we were only able to publish a build for Android OS’s only because of our development pipeline and the resources that we have to work with. “Turtle Boarden” will be available for download on Apple products as soon as we’re done debugging it, we’re hoping to release it in the next two weeks. Some have argued that we should have waited to release our game until the IOS compatible version was ready, but we didn’t feel like waiting and we have a master plan in effect for our marketing campaign.